Page 1 of #Starstruck

CHAPTER ONE

Do you know that feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you’ve reacted and said something maybe you shouldn’t have? As soon as I pushed theTWEETbutton, I regretted it.

In my defense my favorite movie star, Chase Covington, had asked:

The film was a depiction of Caesar Augustus (known to his family as Octavius) as a young man and his rise to power in Rome. And apparently I was the only one who thought he was kind of flat in it. Every other response was typical of his fangirls, who called themselves Chasers. Of theOMG I luv u have my babies!variety. As I scrolled through the responses, I realized I was the only one who wasn’t heaping praise on him.

And it would be only a matter of time before my fellow fans started attacking me. I went to pushDELETE, and this happened.

Chase. Covington. Just. Tweeted. Me.

Me. Regular old Zoe Miller.

My heart froze in my chest, and I might have blacked out for a minute. He had like ten million followers on Twitter. He tweeted pretty regularly and tried to engage with his fan base, but how on earth had he seen what I had written? And responded so quickly?

I knew I should play it cool. That I should come up with something witty and amazing so he’d never forget me. But I was so excited that Chase Covington had actually responded that I couldn’t help myself. With shaking hands, I tweeted him right back.

Thirty seconds later:

Was he upset? Amused? Chase never used emojis, unlike his Chasers, who treated them like decorations and their tweets were Christmas trees. I was anti-emoji, so I appreciated that about him. But sometimes it made it impossible to read context.

People with usernames like @chaseluvr and @chasesbabymama started noticing our conversation and, predictably, sent me hate tweets, asking how dare I be mean to Chase, I should die, my mother should have killed herself before I was born, blah, blah, blah. I’d seen these flame wars before, and I wasn’t interested in being their target.

I was about to turn off my phone when I noticed Chase had tweeted again.

My first thought was creating that list wouldn’t be hard. Like I said, Chase was an extremely talented actor, easily one of the best in Hollywood, and he’d been in the business since he was four years old. He started out on a family sitcom calledNo More, No Less(hence my Twitter username) and graduated to a string of other highly successful TV shows after that one was finally canceled. At seventeen he had switched to movies, and now, at twenty-five, he already had one Academy Award under his belt and was one of the highest paid actors in the world. And he never let anyone pigeonhole him; even now he would do anything from rom-coms to moody historicals to indie dramas.

The second thought was wondering what his game was. Why did he need a list from me? I understood that actors liked to have their egos stroked as much as the next dude, but why did he care what some random fan thought? Wasn’t his other 9,999,999 followers’ adoration enough? Did it have to be unanimous?

I really didn’t have time for this. I had to turn in my celibacy paper to my women’s studies class tomorrow, and I still had about five more pages to write. If Chase needed validation, he could head to his closest mall and let the tweenyboppers scream and fall at his feet.

Before I turned off my phone, one final tweet landed in my notifications. It was from @twihardchaser and said:

Which was followed by a string of poop emojis. Well, there was no arguing with someone who thought marrying a butcher like Caesar Augustus was a good idea.

I took one last look at the picture Chase used as the header on his account, his golden hair and bright-blue eyes making him look like a total California beach god, and turned my phone off. I was determined to focus on my paper, but that last tweet had sucked all the giddy, joyful hope out of me. She was probably right, and I had been chatting with an assistant or his publicist. That would be pretty par for the course for me. To get all excited over something that turned out to be absolutely nothing.

Story of my life.

A couple of years ago I might have immediately agreed with her. There was a period of time when his tweets sounded different. Off. But for the last year or so, he’d gone back to sounding like himself again, and while I didn’t have a reason to doubt, I still did.

Why was it that people wouldn’t let you have one good thing and wanted to destroy it before you even got to enjoy it?

Sighing, I turned my attention back to my paper. Being in my senior year, I had learned the fine art of BSing my work and writing essays in a way that made the professors happy. A few footnotes and quotes, some basic discussion you expounded on to make your paper longer, and you were golden.

So a couple of hours later, I was done. As I gathered up my laptop and phone, I looked at all the other students in the university library, studying and working. Part of me wanted to climb up onto one of the library tables and announce to these strangers that I (might have) just had a Twitter conversation with Chase Covington.

I settled for going back to my apartment instead. I was nearly to the complex when I remembered I had turned off my phone. I restarted it, and my phone dinged repeatedly with notifications. I couldn’t help myself—I checked to see if Chase had said anything else. With a frown of disappointment, I realized he hadn’t, what with the ball being in my court and all.

As I wondered whether I should send him a list of what I thought was his best work, I realized my best friend and roommate, Lexi, had texted me like thirty times, and the texts were all variations of

She was a theater major and, as such, was often prone to dramatics, but this was over the top, even for her. Nearly home, I decided to hold off until I saw her in person. In part because I wasn’t sure what to tell her about Chase Covington.

Lexi was the reason I’d become a Chaser. I was homeschooled by my formerly Amish (not kidding) grandparents until my mother married, had a bunch of kids, and decided she wanted to be my parent again. The first thing she did was enroll me in public school, and at twelve years old I had absolutely no idea how to make friends.

It was Lexi who had come to my rescue. She had approached me at recess, where I stood alone, not knowing what to do, and said, “Do you love Chase Covington? Because I love Chase Covington more than anything in the world, and if you love him, too, we’re going to be best friends.”

I remember how lonely I felt, and if she’d said, “Do you think it’s fun to eat your hair and tear out your fingernails?” I would have agreed and done it just to have one friend. She was true to her word. We became best friends in Ms.Ogata’s sixth-grade class and still were, ten years later.

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